I'm doing some work with a JQuery plugin that counts down text in a textarea box as users enter it. For some reason the plugin is not working as I expect.

I'm a reasonable javascript developer, but haven't built a plugin before. I'm trying to debug this one and figure out why it's not working.

The plugin describes itself as being tested with jQuery 1.3.x and 1.4.x. I have to use 1.7.1.

I've been able to trace into this portion of the plugin using alert()'s -- I can see the processing goes to a certian point, but doesn't seem to be proceeding. Or I may be misreading it as I'm still learning how to debug jQuery plugins.

In the code snippet I've added comments to where I can get alerts to work from and where I can't.